Gen Z is cooking more and shopping less as they struggle to achieve financial success
They say the cost of living is their biggest barrier to financial success.
I can't wait for the "GenZ are killing the restaurant business!" headlines.
To late us millennials already claimed that. Pretty sure we killed restaurants around the same time we killed movie theaters, trade schools, and domestic beer.
Well we killed chain restaurants.. Mainly because nobody can afford to waste our money on microwave crap when we can make better food at home
If you'd only bought fewer iPhones and avocados you could have bought a 5 bedroom house with 3 garages, a pool and a white picket fence and take a holiday abroad twice a year. You just need more discipline, pull yourself up by the bootstraps*!
*I am now going to research what bootstraps are.
Gen Z is cooking more and shopping less as they struggle to
achieve financial successsurvive
FTFY
Fuck, what about millennials? Those guys been fucked even longer.
Edging up to that 4th "once in a lifetime" economic collapse.
Calm down, there is plenty of fucking for everyone.
We're just hiding in the shadows silently eating avocado toast hoping the next generation will fix it because I think we broke it more.
This made me laugh.. but then it made me sad.
(And as a gen z who has no f-ing clue what to do, it makes me scared. Is there room for one more in the corner?)
Our groceries cost as much as ordering in food did 5 years ago.
We barely did as it was too expensive, the future needs some drastic adjustment otherwise some bad shit is going to happen.
Bad shit is already happening. How many more wars need to flare up, how many more inches does the sea need to rise, how many more acres of forest need to burn, how many more mass shootings, how many more people need to reach a point where working a full time job isn't enough to cover rent... I could easily go on. This isn't a future thing anymore. This is all happening now.
I know, right? Millennial, here. I eat out more often than I cook. I should probably be doing what the Zoomers are.
Millennials are still struggling. It's just that this article wasn't about us.
On the bright side I can make pizza from scratch and meal prep virtually guarantees I get the macros I need for the gym.
Yeah, I'm doing better off than most of the people I knew growing up, but I too have been looking at buying the cheapest of everything.
Great Value brand is getting the majority of my purchases these day. Just looked at my cabinet shelf, 18 GV brand items, 2 others (maruchan, rice a roni).
Also cut back on any drinks that don't come out of my faucet (excluding coffee grounds and milk for the coffee).
Media being out of touch with reality while being bootlickers of the wealthy will never stop being funny.
They are owned by the wealthy.
demand better kitchens and kitchen storage in rentals.
it is a fucking joke out here
You guys got rentals?
wtf, financial success?
Not sure i know what that is, but it seems a pretty depressing goal to have.
Could be worse though.
Should be "financial security" imo.
The prospect of not even being able to afford a "cheap" roof over my head scares me regularly.
Now you know why the boomers raise the rent to the point where it makes everyone but themselves miserable. They consider it financial success, where normal people consider it ruthless exploitation.
Better to talk about how they shaped zoning laws and other procedural matters to block the development of new housing for decades and decades.
Sure, the market price of housing is disgustingly high and you can say that it's exploitative to actually charge it, but a much better question is to ask why the market price of housing got so high to begin with, because the answer to that is more complicated than landlords just asking for as much as they can get. They've always done that, so why as has that ceiling price exploded so much in recent decades? That's where you can start to find actual solutions.
Cooking is expensive now too. I'm paying pre-covid eating out prices to cook food at home, and I shop cheap. $80/week if I really hit some savings to feed just myself.
i just started trapping and gathering in the city
Is this a joke? It's hard to tell these days
Are you in Canada or the US? I moved from Canada (Toronto) to Germany, and it's night and day how much less I spend on groceries.
I went from shopping at No Frills in Canda to Lidl/Aldi in Germany, and I spend half as much as I used to. At least in Canada, it's really disappointing to see how Loblaws has managed to get away with so much price gouging.
Yes please all come here and ruin the prices further /s
Prices increased over the last year or so justified by energy prices but in reality it is the profit margins of the supermarkets. Thanks for the inflation Aldi!
Yep part of why I'm moving to Germany next year is the cost of living is so much more reasonable. Groceries costed me just around $25/wk when I was studying abroad. Can't beat that.
Correction: “Gen Z is cooking more and shopping less as they get vastly underpaid”
Aren’t we all? The price of everything has gone up the past few years.
Sometimes I have to go to the fucking food bank- I guess you could say I'm shopping less
Cooking helps you save money, eat better, and can be entertaining. I've started to really get into recently.
Yeah I feel like the headline is intentionally bait-y here.
Eating out adds up fast, and if you're on a limited budget, of course you're going to start cooking more. Even if we're generous with the word "cooking" to include things like cereal and sandwiches. And of course you're going to reevaluate your shopping when money is tight. Lock down to the essentials to stretch that paycheck.
The people who complain about their finances while simultaneously eating out 3x a day and buying shit they don't need are digging their own holes. Spend the money on shit you DO need and save the rest.
My boomer mother only knew how to heat up frozen foods or follow the directions on the box, so what really helped me learn to cook was Good Eats. Watch it and make the food. Many of the recipes were retooled by Alton Brown and are on his website for free (with no annoying monologues before each recipe). The rest are on Food Network’s site.
Also: It's smth to do during small parties, hanging out with friends, dates et cetera.
Roses are red, Violets are blue, Our future ist burning, I am serious look at that shit.
You're learning the skills that none of the humans with the steering wheels can seem to muster - like sticking to a budget.
Now, the questions are:
That's not a bad thing, actually I'd call that a success minus the financial struggles.
I dunno. I read it as "Gen Z is poor" and it pisses me off because its true. It seems like a trend where the rich get richer and the rest of us get just enough to scrape by so we'll show up to work.
That's obviously what they are trying to get across but they affiliate it with something that isn't bad at all and people should be doing either way, financially stable or not. It's kind of a weird argument to say that Gen Z are poor, because it might also mean that they are just consuming more consciously by cooking themselves. There's clearly ways of telling they are poor without this ambiguity.
That's the goal, and poor people are proud to support the wealthy in achieving it.
GenX here, sounds like me a few decades ago, counting the pennies and balancing everything, and not completely succeeding.
Also Gen X and what we had was hard compared to the Boomers but what Millenials and Gen Z have is far worse. This really is apples and oranges going on here.
Another Gen X here, yes, you are right, although being a Gen-Xer in the third world is/was not at all easy, even compared to millennials and Gen Z in the first world.
In any case, the title says "financial success" where it should read "survival skills".
So.. Just keep at it and it will work out? House, spouse, dog, picket fence and all that?
Sorry bud, looks like they ran out of internet. o7
...i bought a house in my mid-fourties, so yeah, i guess that's eventually a thing...
(won't be able to retire before i drop, though)
For many it will. Incomes are increasing in real terms and unemployment remains at historic lows. We also just came through a decade of historically low rates which allowed generations of people to buy expensive homes.
Unfortunately those low rates, the neoliberal practise of high immigration, and NIMBY zoning laws have led to historically expensive housing and rent. Instead of war, that is this generation’s biggest challenge.
Millennial living that life right now. Assuming I stay on track, I might be able to buy a house when I'm in my 40's and literally work until the day I die.
Just save gold and silver, and wait for the market to collapse, then trade it for houses. So many houses. So much gold and silver.
Same here. The struggle was real.
I'm not sure who the article is referring to, but pretty much every Gen Z person I know lives at home with their parents. So not really a strong point being made here. Oh, it's fortune. That explains it.
From experience, fully 75% or more of what comes out on Fortune is bootlicking in disguise of journalism.
Gen Z is as old as like 26. There are plenty living on their own.
Almost all of my 26-and-under co-workers are living at home. Not everyone immediately moves out at 18, and with the sky high housing cost in this area I wouldn't even say 'most'. Even for university, some of these co-workers have degrees but still live at home.
I always assumed cooking was the default.
I grew up in a household that did not cook. It wasn’t always takeout or junk food but “cooking” was grilled cheese and Kraft dinner etc. I loathe cooking.
I often wish I had a healthier (physically and mentally) upbringing that included cooking as a fun activity. Maybe I’d feel different about it.
I don't know of many doing day-to-day cooking for "fun". Its a bother. However, if you're okay without requiring gourmet meals, its not too bad. There are shortcuts.
Pulled pork is one of the easiest, cheapest, and tastiest meals you can make.
Ingredients:
3lbs (or 1.3Kg) Pork - any of these cuts is fine, buy what's cheap:
Buns
Green beans (can is fine to begin/fast, frozen when you want to up your game)
Bottle of BBQ sauce
Instructions:
Empty your can of green beans in a Microwave safe dish and put it on high for 2.5 minutes or until they're hot. Green beans in the can are already cooked when canned, so they're safe to eat at any temperature.
Get a bun, pull out some wonderful pulled pork on it, add some more of the BBQ sauce from your bottle. You've got a protein, a veg, and a starch.
That 3lbs will feed you for almost a week. You can freeze some on day two or three for meals for future weeks.
if it makes you feel better I was raised in a house where my mom cooked. But she was not real great about it. Actually she could make some great stuff on holidays so more limited budget combined with limited effort really. Im not sure she liked to cook really but she pretty much had to. Typical week was chili, spagehetti, chilimac, shakeNbake leg quarters, macNcheese. Anyway Im not a very good cook. I don't necessarily loathe it, but im not good. Particularly at seasoning. that is the tough part. I can bake decently. Usually that is just following the recipe exactly and can grill decently.
All 3 of our kids that are still at home can cook well & we take turns doing it throughout the week. Been 6 months so far & it's working out great.
Cooking lets you off dish duty for the evening, too :D
Or some just like cooking and don't give a damn about consumerism?
I'm not exactly struggling with finances. I cook all my food because I like to and have time. I hardly buy stuff because I unbrainwashed myself from consumerism.
Half the reason I semi-retired in my 30s is because I need little to satisfy me after de-bloating my mind.
I have a baby son and a wife and plenty of time to spend with them.
All of the people I know who have more money than me do not have any of this.
Be careful! Humble bragging can cause serious injury due to the stick up your ass!
@theq Oh don't get me started flexing on how I sleep on the floor and no longer own a car
The reason for this is bad but the end result is good. Let's hope these habits stick around once people are in a better spot.
I wouldn't get your hopes too high.
In the wake of the 2008 crisis, many people stopped buying huge gas-guzzling automobiles and started buying smaller and more fuel efficient vehicles.
Sure enough, as things recovered, people bounced right back to the SUVs.
I like making homemade chicken bowls. They were originally meant to be cheaper alternatives, but KFC food quality is kinda shit sometimes, so at this point I outright prefer my own version. Mine also has shrimp since they take about the same time to cook as the chicken, so I mix throw that in.
Just frozen corn at the bottom (well, heat it up, just follow the instructions on the bag, I usually just stick frozen veggies on the microwave with a bit of water for 3 mins).
Then the breaded shrimp or some popcorn chicken pieces on the bottom with the corn.
Then mashed potatoes. Instant or ones made from actually smashing potatoes work (for real ones, just peel some potatoes and cut them up into smallish chunks and boil them for about 10 minutes, then drain the water, add some milk and butter (or dairy free alternatives). About 1 tbsp of butter, I like to do the milk by ear, starting with too little and adding more until the moisture is about right. Also add salt or it'll taste like it's missing something. Taste it for both milk (moisture level rather than flavour) and salt (flavour for this one) to get it right. You can add oregano or chives, or any green seasoning to enhance it without changing the flavour profile entirely. Or if you want to change it entirely, go with curry powder, Cajun, or some other spice blend (not sure that would work with chicken bowl, but it doesn't hurt to experiment).
Then more chicken on the top, shredded cheese, and gravy (I use envelope gravy, pretty quick and easy to make, just follow the directions). Add paprika or cayenne for colour/heat.
I use envelope gravy
Maybe it's just me, but the envelopes on my desk don't look particularly tasty. (I assume this means something else, heh)
You'd be surprised at how well they turn out when combined with meat juices and water! Actually, I wonder if you could use ground up paper (like dust) to replace flour and make gravy.
But I meant the dried up gravy solids you mix with water and heat up that comes in envelopes at the grocery store.
The title of this article reads lile a dr seuss book
Where are they getting their ingridients from to cook if they shop less? Or do they just eat less? Is this about starvation?
From personal experience:
Careful with the self check shenanigans, especially at Target. They wait to let you know they know until you reach felony price totals and then have you arrested. https://www.paypath.com/Small-Business/why-target-is-the-worst-store-to-shoplift-from
That's a solid take on avocado.
You shop less when you buy whole ingredients and make sizeable batches than when you buy pre-made food. They're shopping more efficiently.
Why is this a headline? It's just called living within your means. Smart people have been doing this forever, it's nothing news worthy.
And they’re doing it cheerfully, I’m led to believe. Images don’t lie. Look how happy they are.
I never go out to eat anymore. Not worth the drive and everything is ridiculously overpriced.
Walmart+ has been a blessing because I can get groceries delivered to my house same-day.
I think restaurants are just taking more advantage of an ever-shrinking pool of idiots.
I'm in a dual income houshold, in a single bed/single bath apartment that, 5 or 6 years ago, would have run for about $600/month. Now it costs us $1200 (this is in Canada where the housing market is in complete and utter shambles, only getting worse and heading for a complete fiery crash).
At this rate, I will never be able to afford a mortgage. Let alone a mortgage and car payments, let alone all that plus food, utilities, or any liesure activities to, y'know, give me and my girl any sort of quality of life. No wonder we eat Kraft mac n cheese and hot dogs instead of hitting the town on friday nights.
Good. They're finally learning that sending all your earnings to UberEats middlemen isn't a sustainable way to live.